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She never said anything about wanting a boyfriend or even liking someone.
Yeah, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t thought about it.
Lately, when Langdon’s mind starts to drift, he finds himself thinking about Mel.
At the grocery store, he does a double-take when he spots a blonde woman picking through the produce bins, but it isn’t her. On his way home, he passes a bulletin board advertising the Pittsburgh Renaissance Festival, and he wonders if she ended up finding someone to go with her. Later that afternoon, when Tanner insists on another episode of Paw Patrol, he wonders whether he’d still be sane after 164 repeat viewings.
He’s still sleeping in the guest bedroom. Abby has forgiven but not forgotten. Trust has to be earned, she reminds him, and it drives him nuts because she isn’t wrong. He’s working his steps, spending hours each week in therapy and in group, making amends to anyone and everyone. These things can’t be rushed, but patience was never his strong suit, and what he really wants to do is ask her just how much longer she’s going to go on punishing him. It’s not a healthy way to think; it isn’t fair. But it’s how he feels, and he can’t help that and more than Abby can.
Overall, things are better between them. Some of the ice has begun to thaw; a new entente has emerged. But even so, there’s still so much distance between them, a chasm he still can’t bridge after ten months of trying. Sometimes, he catches her looking at him with an appraiser’s steely gaze, her expression cool and distant.
Mel never looks at him with anything other than warmth. Even after everything, her respect and admiration has never wavered, not for one moment. She stares at him, and she doesn’t seem to realize she’s doing it until his eyes meet hers and she abruptly looks away, cheeks turning pink.
She likes him. Like likes him, in the parlance of middle school. Neither of them has acknowledged it, although she must know he knows. Maybe she’s hoping he forgot or that he misunderstood Becca’s meaning.
But he can’t forget and he understood Becca perfectly well. She’s got a crush on him, and he supposes he’s got one on her as well, which feels ridiculous to even acknowledge. He’s still in love with his wife, whatever in love means after ten years, two kids, and a protracted stint in rehab. Abby is a good woman, a good wife, and yet he can’t stop lingering on the memory of his first day back, Becca’s cheerful “I can see why you like him!” and Mel’s answering stammer, her refusal to meet his eyes after.
He wonders whether she knows how easy she is to read. It’s one of the things that fascinates him most, that translucent quality she has, the way every unguarded emotion flits across her face. More and more often, he finds himself saying things to her to test that reaction, trying to provoke a blush or smile. It makes him feel like a kid again, not some washed-up loser repeated his fourth year of residency.
He wonders whether she would have liked him in middle school. He thinks no. All twelve-year-old boys are obnoxious, and he had been especially so, lanky in an unappealing awkward way, insecure in the way of all overlooked middle children. He’d been a serial fidgeter, a maestro of the well-timed fart joke, more interested in kickball than crushes. Anathema to girls like Mel, the quiet ones who sat at the unpopular table at lunch and spent recess in the library instead of on the playground.
His first kiss had been with a girl like Mel. Jennifer Mitnick, who’d been six inches taller than him in seventh grade, who knew all the presidents in order, who always smelled like Cheerios and dryer sheets. She’d been the first girl in their grade to get her period, and so much time had gone by that Langdon no longer remembered how or why everyone had found out about it.
He’d kissed her on a dare. Fear Factor had been everyone’s favorite show, and in the mucky spring months when the snow hadn’t melted and the lawns were too muddy for football or kickball, the boys had spent all of recess coming up with the worst and grossest dares they could imagine. Eat the sandwich that had been soaked in the milk pail. Pick up the dog turd with your bare hand and throw it into the teachers’ parking lot. Kiss Jenny Mitnick.
He cornered her behind the backstop during afternoon recess. It happened quick, and all his friends had shrieked with laughter, wretching and gagging. It would have been an excellent joke, except for the way Jenny looked at him after, the bewidlered terror in her eyes. He’d recoiled then—not in disgust but in hot, agonizing shame—because he knew immediately that he had hurt her, really hurt her in an awful, unfixable, grown-up kind of way. His first kiss and hers, ruined forever, wasted on petty adolescent cruelty.
Abby had looked at him in almost the same way when he’d told her what Robby had found in his locker on the day of the Pittfest shooting.
Just something else to try not to think about.
He thinks instead about Mel. Her smile, her sweetness, her skill as a physician. Her quiet confidence, the unshowy way she works with patients, the eagerness with which she explains diagnoses and courses of treatment. The curve of her neck and shoulder, the way her braid hangs down her back and settles between her shoulderblades. When she bends over a patient or her notes, he has to suppress the boyish urge to pull her hair.
Really, what he wants is to lift her braid and feel the weight of it in his hands, to press his lips up against the pale, exposed skin at the base of her neck. In his imagination, she lets it happen, melting against him while he runs his hands down her sides, slipping them underneath her scrub top to trace the curve of hip and belly, coming up to cup her breasts. It’s sexual, but it’s more than that. It’s protective, perhaps possessive. There’s something vampiric in the way he wants her, a desire to capture some of her warmth and light for himself. She is sensitive, unadorned. Without artifice. There aren’t many people like her out there. He wants her to stay that way forever, perfect and unchanging, counterpoint to all the cynicism floating around the ED, negative ions in the social current connecting all the patients and medical personnel and environmental services staff.
He wonders how she’d fit into his life. He imagines her next to him as he’s running errands, imagines her watching from the house while he mows the lawn. When he unloads the dishwasher, he imagines Mel at the stove, turning pancakes. What would it be like, he wonders, to turn around and see her there?
It’d be a fresh start, he thinks. A second chance. Something new, unsullied by everything he has said and done, by ten years of unspoken resentment. Abby sacrified so much for him, carries all that knowledge inside of her. Mel still looks at him like he’s shiny and new, like none of the awful things he’s done matters. And to her, maybe they don’t. Maybe she’s just that good, that forgiving.
Just a crush, he tells himself. Only that and nothing more